The Prospect for Occupational Health Nursing Activities in Small and Medium Sized Workplaces

Abstract

The Prospect for Occupational Health Nursing Activities in Small and Medium Sized Workplaces: Moon-Hee JUNG. Department of Nursing, College of Medicine, Hanyang University—In Korea, nurses perform their services in different ways according to the scale of the workplace: In large workplaces they work as full-timers and in small and medium ones they work as visiting nurses, placed by health management agencies. Regardless of their ways of service, occupational health nurses conduct a large part of health management affairs. Health management affairs have so far aimed at decreasing occupational diseases, but when working conditions are improved and occupational diseases decrease, their goals will be changed, aiming at the health promotion and the prevention of general diseases which have been steadily increasing. As occupational health nursing activities are expected to be changed to accomplish such goals, the roles of nurses are also expected to be expanded. The expected role of nurses is to provide high quality professional services suitable for the scale of the workplace, the nursing activity methods and the goals of health management. In practice, however, there are not a few restraints on them to adequately perform such roles. Most of all, because of poor working conditions, their turnover is high and their term of service is short. In relation to this, the tendency to replace them with less experienced nurses may give rise to quite a few problems in maintaining reliable relationships with workplaces as well as providing professional services. Therefore, in order to produce high-quality professional services, it is necessary to improve the working conditions of nurses so as to secure nurses who can work for a long time. What is most important is to allow occupational health nurses to perform standard services by function. (J Occup Health 1999; 41: 47-50)